New report highlights ‘boundless potential’ of AR mobile gaming

Augmented reality
(AR) and virtual reality (VR) are two of the
hottest technology trends in gaming, both offering a new layer of
immersion for gamers. By 2022, the AR/VR
market size is predicted to be $192.7 billion, with a
significant part of this market growth likely to be driven by
gaming. However, AR and VR are very different beasts in the world of
mobile gaming. While VR has its challenges and limitations on mobile,
AR appears to have boundless potential. This was the conclusion
of an Arm commissioned report ‘The New Reality
for Mobile Gaming: The VR/AR Opportunity’, from the
market intelligence agency Newzoo, which
investigated the mobile gaming opportunities for AR and VR.

VR vs. AR on mobile

On mobile,
there are options for gamers to turn their phones into VR headsets, such
as through Google Daydream and Samsung GearVR.
However, according to
the Newzoo report, only nine percent
of smartphones worldwide are VR compatible (this figure
doesn’t include Google Cardboard). On the other hand, the report
states that 26 percent of active smartphone devices are able to use
either Apple’s ARKit or Google’s ARCore. In fact, Google
has been steadily adding new device support for ARCore. In
addition, more gamers have played AR-based games than VR-based games
on mobile. From a Newzoo survey of over 2,000 people in the
U.S., 53 percent have played AR-based games more than once on mobile, whereas
the figure is 28 percent for VR-based games. Overall, AR-based
mobile gaming appears to be more accessible than VR-based mobile gaming,
while AR-based games are far more commonplace on mobile.

Gaming and Virtual Reality are a great fit, and much of the VR gaming growth has come through PC and console-based experiences. VR makes existing games more immersive, which is recognized by many leading games that have been adapted for VR, such as Doom, Fallout 4, Skyrim and Borderlands 2. Gaming – across all platforms – is also the most common use of VR, with 73 percent of Americans surveyed by Newzoo stating that they have used VR to play games. Focusing specifically on mobile-based VR headsets, the majority of apps are gaming – 62 percent for Daydream and 69 percent for Gear VR.

However, barriers remain in making Virtual Reality more accessible to consumers, with expensive hardware that requires a dedicated space and long set-up time. To get around these barriers, VR headset-makers have been developing all-in-one cordless solutions featuring cost and energy-efficient, high performance mobile processors. Oculus and HTC are leading this space through devices like Oculus Go and HTC Vive Focus, while the soon to be available Oculus Quest is capable of Rift-like VR experiences in a truly portable form factor.

Another challenge is the limited Virtual Reality gaming content. Developers are waiting for VR to gather momentum before committing to more VR-based games. However, consumers want to see more content to justify the high cost of purchasing a VR headset, which means headset-makers are holding off developing more hardware. This awkward catch-22 situation can lead to innovation stagnation on both content and hardware.

Since
2016, there have been significant investments into AR. In
addition to Apple’s investment in ARKit and Google’s into ARCore, over $6
billion has been raised by AR/VR businesses in 2018, with the largest
investments going to AR companies. These include
investments into Magic Leap, Epic Games (the owner of
Unreal Engine, which has a development platform for AR apps) and Niantic (the creator
of the renowned location-based AR games including Pokémon Go).

The ability of Augmented Reality to enhance your world, environment and merge new realities lends itself perfectly to mobile gaming. The Newzoo report explored the number of AR apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in 2018 that mentioned ARKit or ARCore in their descriptions respectively, with gaming apps being the largest category. Twenty-five percent of all downloaded ARKit-based apps in the Apple iOS app store are games, with the percentage increasing to 74 percent ARCore-based apps in the Google Play Store. Interestingly, for the top 20 AR apps in the Apple iOS App store only six are gaming, whereas eight are gaming in the Google Play Store. This perhaps indicates that there is still a lack of innovative gaming content that truly resonates with consumers, but given the large pool of compatible smartphones this situation is evolving fast.

ARKit and ARCore are relatively new software development kits, with continuous investment from Google and Apple respectively bringing improvements and new features with each new release. This means developers are still learning how to best develop for Augmented Reality. Similarly, dedicated AR hardware is also in the early stage of development. Microsoft’s recently launched HoloLens2, which has moved to an Arm-based platform, is being targeted at businesses, not consumers. Wearable AR glasses is where the future of AR lies for consumers, but this is still several years away.

It will be
interesting to see how these AR wearables can be combined with smartphones to
provide immersive AR gaming experiences on mobile. Qualcomm has recently
partnered with Nreal, an AR smart
glasses manufacturer, which involves cross-platform compatibility
with smartphones that use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 4G mobile platform, which
is built on Arm CortexTM technology. Essentially, the
AR smart glasses can be connected to a smartphone to utilise its computing
power, which has potentially exciting implications for mobile gaming.

Exciting gaming potential

VR and AR
have massive potential in gaming, but maybe with a different
audience focus. VR gaming is most likely to be enjoyed
by core gamers on high-end PCs, consoles and dedicated,
mobile processor powered, VR devices, as the immersion it
offers requires a controlled space to
experience, whereas AR has far more potential for mainstream
success through mobile. This is highlighted by recent success
stories that use AR features, such as Pokémon Go. Moreover, many
smartphones are already equipped to handle AR games and experiences,
and, most importantly, AR can be experienced in almost any
situation. As with mobile gaming in general, the key
is more performant smartphones, powered by Arm
technology, offering premium gaming experiences that are AR and
VR capable.

However, quality content
shortages and hardware innovation are affecting both AR and
VR. The challenge is getting past the catch-22 situation where game
developers are not developing content because the hardware isn’t developing
fast enough, but hardware makers aren’t developing the hardware because not
enough innovative content is available. Expect this to change –
especially for AR – as more and more AR and VR-capable
smartphones hit the market. This is likely to justify the increasing
allocation of developer resources.

AR is
still evolving, but support and innovations in hardware and
software are happening at an accelerating rate. With Arm-based mobile
technologies supporting a huge eco-system of hardware and
software partners, it is only a matter of time before AR-based
mobile gaming really takes off. As I mentioned in a previous
Arm blog, I’m convinced that AR is on the right track to be everyone’s
must have by 2023. Expect more innovation around hardware
and content to happen over the next several years, as
consumer adoption of AR on devices starts
to accelerate.